Interesting article about England's eVoting pilots, and the hope for increased voter turnout. The last local elections in the UK attracted only 1/3 of registered voters. And while the various (smaller scale) pilots that ran last year all saw increased turnout, most people are unconvinced that these new iniatitives will make much of a difference. "Some people would say that these new measures will increase turnout fairly substantially the first time round," sayd Dennis Reed, director of thinktank Local Government Information Unit thinktank, "then people will get just as used to it as the ordinary type of voting and get concerned about whether their vote really matters."
I'm not going to get into a whole debate about apathy and democracy, but the actual technology and execution seems very well thought out. Registered voters were sent two smart cards in the mail, one with an identification number and the other with a passcode. Both must be used, and each were mailed seperately, which is a simple, but relatively effective security measure. The cards can be inserted into kiosks, or the numbers on each card entered online, or via wireless text messaging. The voting begins officially tomorrow, and will continue for several days.
Today begins a 3 day Federal Trade Commission Spam Forum "to address the proliferation of unsolicited commercial e-mail and to explore the technical, legal, and financial issues associated with it. "
The Forum is open to the public, so if you are in the DC area, maybe you would like to stop by and let me know whats going on? Otherwise, they've already put up some of the materials being presented by the panelists. You can also visit the official FTC Spam site.
Considering how techno-illiterate most legislators are, spam has gotten to be a huge issue - I'm aware of at least two anti-spam bills bouncing around congress and that shouldn't be a surprise. Considering that 40% of all email sent is spam and 2/3 of all spam contains false info, I can't imagine anyone besides a few Nigerian Con-Men could be pro-spam. Being an anti-spam legislator is a poltical slam dunk and a way to gain some quick and easy public relations cache.
But, as much as I detest spam, and wish I received less of it (between 3 different emails, I probably receive more than 100 pieces of spam a day), I'm not sure how I feel about anti-spam laws. I have this nagging feeling about them, and I don't quite know enough about the law to explain why.
It is staggering to hear, but US portal FirstGov does not currently use a Content Management System (CMS). Each page on the site is hand-coded, but not for much longer. the General Services Administration recently signed a half million dollar contract for use of Vignette's CMS software.
To illustrate why a CMS is so important, here is a quote from M.J. Jameson, s GSA associate administrator:
"When the Columbia shuttle tragedy happened, we took 24 hours to get up what we needed to get up," Jameson said. "If we had had this content management system, the people who do that for FirstGov could have done it from home within 20 minutes."
Not only do CMSs save time and money, they allow the technically illititerate to update without calling in tech support, the dynamic generation of content, and easier changes to design/site architecture. I'm really shocked they would still be hand-coding.
The license is governmentwide, which is also pretty amazing. Any government agency that is still hand-coding is wasting money, and should be strongly encouraged to make the move to Vignette as soon as possible (not that I have any pull in that regard).
Assessment of Electronic Government Information Products
This report was put together in early 1999, so is a little dated, but it is still an interesting look at the initital efforts towards providing digital access to documents in the Federal Depository Library Program. At the time, the study found that: there was no unified standards across government agencies, little thought had been given to permanent access to the digital materials, there are authenticity issues (census data provided by GPO Access rather than the Census Dept. website), no central web authority - even within individual agencies.
It seems like most of those concerns have since been solved (or at least addressed to some degree), but I wasn't able to find a follow-up report.
Nothing to do with anything, really, but I'm amazed at how the banner above has ads relevant to the site's topic. I wonder if it is a human who goes through all the new Blogger blogs and defines keywords, or whether they are able to grab them off the site description, and if so, I wonder what kind of thesaurus they are using in order to serve appropriate ads.
I'm also shocked that the site is already getting Google requests. I also checked and the site is currently the #3 result for "egov blog."
The National Defense University graduated the first student from its eGovernment Leadership Certificate Program on April 11. I'd been wondering if such a program existed, and here it is. 75 of the 100 or so people in the program are currently employed by the Department of Defense, but the program encourges citizen applicants.
For those of you who like to watch, the Advanced Traveler Information System (ATIS) of the New York City Department of Transportation (DOT) provides access to nearly 80 traffic webcams throughout all 5 boroughs. There are 62 cameras providing still images, which are updated every 15-30 seconds, and another 17 cameras that provide full streaming images.
The cameras are meant to help DOT staff assess trafic conditions around the city, but New York City decided that since the technology and capabilities were already in place they could let everyone have access (they also include the streams on the city's public access television station). Compared to Ohio (see below) this is a very forward thinking approach on the use of the web.
The Ohio House of Representative may pass bill that would limit government agencies ability to provide free information on their websites. The bill, HB 145, had been voted down last year, but was attached to this year's budget bill without any debate.
The bill is based on non-compete laws, the idea that government agencies should not compete without private enterprise. If the bill were to pass information provided by at least two private corporations, would not be also legal to post on any government websites. This article from the Cleveland Plain Dealer explains it more.
A silly example - if you can wal into a rest stop along any Interstate in Ohio and pick up a free roadmap, provided by the state, despite the fact that if you'd walked into the gas station only a few steps away, you'd have to pay for a similar map. But if you wanted to download an Ohio map online, you couldn't because Mapquest and Expedia already provide that service.
This really punctuates the continuing mind-set of some legislators that the Internet is somehow outside the scope of traditional government services, rather than what it really is, just an extension of those services in a new form. Citizens are legally entitled to free government information. Yet, somehow when that information is provided online, in a more readibly available manner, it is subject to different rules.
(links via (beSpacific)
The UK is preparing to enact nation-wide eVoting by 2006. Toward that goal, they'll be offering 17 pilot eVoting schemes include Digital TV, wireless text messaging, touch-tome telephone, internet, and kiosks. All in all, the government will be testing more than 40 different voting methods, with the opportunity for 1.4 people to participate in the pilot programs for the upcomming May elections.
Accenture (formerly known as Anderson Consulting) is a corporate entity frequently partnered with governments around the world to provide eGov solutions. They've recently issued their fourth annual eGovernment Leadership Report .
Their study identified five major trends in eGovernment:
** eGovernment matures through a series of plateaus.
No eGov iniative goes online fully formed. Even with a growing collection of case studies/best practices, eGov is an iterative process. As returns are reaped on simple initatives, more ambitious goals are set.
** Value drives eGovernment visions.
Compared to the early days of dot.com, "just because it'd be cool" isn't a good enough reason for a government agency to do something online. There must be a tangible ROI (saved money/time, increased customer satisfaction) to justify eGov inititatives.
** Customer Relationship Management (CRM) underpins eGovernment.
This should be a given in any industry. If the customer's needs are met, than an initiative is successful. A happy, engaged customer, remains a customer.
** Increasing take-up is a priority.
The more services you provide online, the more users you need using those services to make it worthwhile. The question is, how do you inform people about, and get them to use those services.
** New eGovernment targets are needed.
The study found that a lot of eGov iniatives were started to achieve a basic level of service as compared to other similar governments. This isn't neccessarily an effective way to do business. The question should alwasy be "how do I serve my customers," not "how does my competitor serve their customers."
The five plateaus mentioned above are: Online Presence, Basic Capability, Service Availability, Mature Delivery, and Service Transofrmation. The meaning of first four should be relatively clear, but the last might need a little explaining. The way I understand it, service transformation involves using eGov not merely as a way to duplicate services provided offline as well, but as a way for effecting change throughout all levels of the government and serving the needs of users in ways that aren't served otherwise.
Does your Congressman have a website? Look for your Representative or Senator.
I didn't count, but it looks like all the Senators and most, if not all, of the Representatives have their own websites. It is interesting that, while all the congressmen are hosted within the Senate and House website, each is designed and maintained seperately, and some are pretty awful. It seems like it would be more efficient to provide a template (or a choice from a number of templates), and a content management system. Kind of like Blogger here.
This would certainly make it easier (and cheaper) to develop and maintain each Senate/Rep site. And though most users wouldn't need to visit the sites for any Senators or Representative other than their own, an arguement can definitely be made that a uniform template would make site navigation much simpler.
Last week the Council for Excellence in Government released a report on the attitudes and expectations of eGov. The study found that half of all Americans and 75% of all Internet users have interacted on some level with an eGov website.
The research found that those performing tasks, like renewing their drivers licence, were easier online, which is a pretty obvious conclusion. Actually, all the findings were obvious - users would like to complete tedious tasks (like filing taxes, and paying parking tickets) online, they felt eGov would only get better over the course of years, but there were some privacy issues. Still, it is sometimes worthwhile to do a survey like this to confirm that end-users and developers are actually on the same page as far as expectations and desires.
This isn't strictly about eGov, but it is related. The Internet Library of Law and Court Decisions is a database of over 300 court decisions shaping the law of the web. Each case includes an extensive summary filled with facts, analysis and pertinent quotes. Topics addressed include "copyright, trademark, dilution and other intellectual property issues, jurisdiction, linking, framing, meta tags, clip-art, defamation, domain name, e-mail, encryption, gambling, click-wrap agreements, shrink-wrap licenses, spamming," and more.
I was a bit wary of this material, since it is collected and written by a law firm, but the site has been approved by Scout, so it is definitely on the level.
From what I can tell, Europa is the official portal for information about the European Union. In addition to news, legislation, etc, about the EU, they provide handy links to all official European gov't websites.
Also, they recently released a collection of reports on case studies and best practices of EU eGov initiatives. So far, there are 14 reports from 10 countries, covering local, national, and international projects.
England has a pretty comprehensive effort to e-enable their government services. I haven't read through the entire strategy document, but it seems that, while the US federal government's strategy involves consolidating activities to a few central departments, the UK policy enourages more activity at the local level.
I suppose that has something to do with the way our constitution was written, what with state's rights and decentralized government and all that, but it will be interesting to contrast the effectiveness of a top-down vs. a bottom-up development strategy. It seems like the UK has an immediate edge, because concentrating on local iniatitives will allow them to deliver new services more quickly (for example, they speculate that the elements for eVoting could be in place as early as 2008), but the US strategy has a long range benefit in creating a stable platform to support more ambitious future expansions. We'll see.
The Center for Digital Government is a thinktank/consultancy. I'm not sure how useful their research-for hire is to their target market of "government, industry and education leaders," but I enjoyed the (free) reports on top Digital Cities and Digital States, and the general Best of the Web awards.
They are in the process of compiling the 2003 awards, but you can take a look at the 2002 winners.
Some of the criteria for sites being judged were:
David Fletcher claims to be "a long-time egov advocate." And he is from Utah. That is all I can learn about him from his website. Still, his Government and Technology Weblog has archives strecthing for nearly a year, and he seems to really know his stuff. His weblog isn't specifically about eGov, though he does have a seperate category for it, and hits stories as diverse as online fishing licences, wireless health alerts, Senate XML feeds, and eFiling his taxes.
eGov Links is a portal/directory of sites and news stories on a variety of topics, including accessibility, eVoting, security and privacy. Also categorized geographically. This site is relatively sparse at the moment, but seems to be a growing community.
Egov.it was developed in conjunction with the Global Conference on Reinventing Government, held earlier this year in Naples, Italy. The developers tried to provide an overview of e-government websites from all over the world. This is an annotated directory of over 1,000 sites, with links to 10,000 more.
The English isn't stellar, but the concept and information are. Don't be put off by the language or the quirky interface, this site is worth the effort.
The budget and strategy discussed below are all part of the new Office of Electronic Government, which, ironically, doesn't have a website of its own yet.
The OEG was officially created April 16, 2003, and is headed by Mark Forman. Furman is basically the United States' first CIO. Good for him. Forman has an Masters in Applied Microeconomics, was in the Army Corps of Engineers, created and led IBM's Public Sector e-business Consulting Services, and has been involved in various branchs of government for nearly 20 years (including having a hand in the Paper Reduction Act).
Upon the announcement of Forman's new position, he participated in an online chat, answering questions received from the public. Questions hit a variety of topics, from policy, to technology, to privacy and budget concerns.
ElectricNews.net:E-GOVERNMENT is a collection of eGov stories from the Irish technology newswire. There is an obvious technology focus to the articles, rather than a social or public policy focus, and the news is also obviously very Eurocentric, but this is an excellent and frequently updated (several new stories a week) source for information.
Here is the Official e-Gov Strategy
This isn't the most exciting read ever, but a good one nonetheless. The basic gist is that eGov activities are to consolidated under the central authority of the Office of E-Government and Information Technology for the purpose of making "the Federal government more results oriented, efficient and citizen-centered."
Basically, the goal of the strategy and the new office is to help make the Feds web activities more useful from a citizen standpoint, rather than a organizational standpoint. It will be really interesting to see how well they are able to accomplish this, considering a lot of commercial organizations still use their web prescence as a marketing tool, rather than for customer service. I can't imagine the government bureaucracy will be any more agile and responsive than big business has been, but we can hope, right?
Congress has cut $40 million from the federal egov initiative. When you talk about the federal budget juggles trillions of dollars, $40 million doesn't seem like a whole lot, but Bush had only asked for $45 million.
So, even though "half of the American population has used a federal, state or local government Web site," Congress thinks it's fair to allocate less than a quarter per citizen to allow increased access to government documents and services.